Dreros

Dreros (Ancient Greek: Δρῆρος), also (representing Modern Greek pronunciation) Driros, near Neapoli in the regional unit of Lasithi, Crete, is a post-Minoan archaeological site, 16 km northwest of Agios Nikolaos. Known only by a chance remark of the 9th-century Byzantine grammarian Theognostus (De orthographia), archaeology of the site shows Dreros to have been initially colonised by mainland Greeks in the early Archaic Period about the same time as Lato and Prinias.

The early Iron Age site, first excavated in 1917, was most prosperous in the 8th–6th centuries BCE; later it became a minor satellite of Knossos and continued to be occupied into the Byzantine period. It comprises two acropoleis with an Archaic-period agora between them. Almost the whole of the city and its necropolis have been excavated, confirming that this is a post-Minoan Greek habitation; its inscriptions are in Dorian dialect. Traces of fortifications have been discovered.

There is also a large communal cistern dug between the late 3rd and early 2nd century BCE, which contained Archaic inscriptions, one of which, famous as the Dreros inscription, the "sacred law of Dreros", is the earliest complete record of constitutional law found in Greece, which mentions the Dorian Cretan titles kosmos and damios.

In Hellenistic times, Dreros declined in importance to the extent that it was not included among the thirty Cretan cities that signed a pact with the Attalid king of Pergamum, Eumenes II, in 183 BCE.

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